Bodine, who was chairman of Cortview Capital Securities before it was acquired by Pierpont in March, will join Canaccord in the next few weeks, according to a person with direct knowledge of the hiring.

The move follows this month's defections from Pierpont of high-yield researcher Mark Pibl, loan salesman Charles Womack and nine others in the Stamford-based firm's credit unit, according to a Sept. 9 internal memo obtained by Bloomberg News, the contents of which were confirmed by Scott Davidson, a Canaccord spokesman.

Canaccord is expanding its team of corporate-debt brokers as smaller firms from Pierpont to Gleacher and Knight Capital Group shrink, shutter or sell their credit businesses. Pierpont, one of the firms that was started to capitalize on a pullback by the biggest Wall Street firms after the 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings, got out of junk-debt trading and sales after 11 people quit, Chief Administrative Officer Karen Ogden said on Sept. 3.

Bodine didn't respond to an email seeking comment and Canaccord spokesman Davidson said he couldn't comment.

Canaccord, with headquarters in Vancouver, is expanding as dollar-denominated corporate bond sales soar to a record pace. Companies have sold $1.03 trillion of notes in the U.S. this year, up from $981 billion in the same period last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Last month, Canaccord hired Stephen Lobb, the former head of credit sales at Societe Generale in London, to run U.S. fixed-income sales. It also added Barry Dennis, who has worked at brokers including Sterne Agee & Leach and Chapdelaine's now-shuttered credit unit, to run U.S. structured products.

In the memo, the company said a new head of U.S. fixed income was "to be announced shortly."

High-yield, high-risk bonds, rated below Baa3 by Moody's Investors Service and lower than BBB- at Standard & Poor's, have returned 2.9 percent in the U.S. this year, compared with 11.5 percent in the same period last year, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data.

Cortview received a commitment of up to $125 million from private-equity firm Warburg Pincus in September 2010. Pierpont also got private-equity funding in 2010, receiving capital from Stone Point Capital and General Atlantic.